Prague Orders 25 More 52T Trams in Eight Days, Ahead of New Cyber Rules

Prague's councillors decided on 7 September to buy another 25 Škoda ForCity 52T trams, a purchase assembled in eight days and announced at the press conference after the meeting by Zdeněk Kovářík, the councillor for finance. Zdopravy.cz, which reported the decision, describes it as a surprise: the order had been the subject of speculation for a few days and was taken extremely quickly.

The money is 1.232 billion crowns. Half comes from the European OP Doprava programme, half from this year's city budget, where according to Kovářík savings appeared because other projects ran late. A single tram costs 82.5 million crowns, of which 40 million is covered by the European subsidy. The order still has to be approved by the city assembly.

Together we had to put the tram material through in eight days, which in the conditions of the city is an extreme time.

— Zdeněk Kovářík, Prague councillor for finance

Why the rush is written into the price

The reason given is regulatory rather than operational. Kovářík said the city was looking for a mechanism to keep buying because it is being pressed by new cyber-security rules, which would mean higher prices and longer deliveries. New European Commission rules are expected to tighten the definition of cyber-security requirements for vehicles; what they will look like is not yet clear, and Jaromír Beránek, the councillor for transport, said their implementation may bring a "period of interpretive uncertainty" that would feed through into delivery times and probably into prices.

Kovářík put the supply-chain half of the argument plainly:

Trams use basic components that are also used for combat purposes. There may be a shortage of them and the price will rise in a jump. Production is moreover more complicated and more expensive. What we can get from Škoda now, we will get at a comprehensible price and in a reasonable time.

— Zdeněk Kovářík, Prague councillor for finance

That is an unusually explicit statement of why a procurement is being pulled forward. The deadline is dated: Beránek said 51 cars in total will be delivered next year by 3 December 2027, because the new cyber-security rules start to apply at that point. Five of the 25 newly ordered cars are to arrive still this year and the rest during next year.

Ninety-six cars out of a framework for two hundred

The purchase runs under the framework contract Prague holds with Škoda Group for up to 200 units of the 52T. Counting this order, the city will take 96 of them — almost half the framework — and will have that number by the end of next year.

The sequence to date: 40 articulated cars in the first two deliveries, then a contract signed in January this year for a further 31 financed from the TransGov programme, and now 25 more. Around 30 cars have been built so far, according to Beránek.

Kovářík framed the accumulation as a maintenance argument rather than a capacity one.

I am a fan of unifying the fleet, which will lower maintenance costs. We are trying to speed the purchases up as far as Škoda's production capacity allows us.

— Zdeněk Kovářík, Prague councillor for finance

Read together, the two arguments point the same way and are worth separating. Fleet unification is a long-run case for buying one type in quantity, and it does not depend on any deadline. The cyber-security regulation is a short-run case for buying that quantity now, at a known price, before a rule whose text nobody has yet seen changes what the next batch costs. The eight days are the second argument, not the first.

What the assembly is being asked to approve, then, is a purchase whose scale was already implied by the framework and whose timing was set by Brussels. If the councillors are right about the regulation, the alternative to deciding in eight days was not deciding more slowly at the same price — it was deciding later at a higher one. If they are wrong, the city has committed 1.232 billion crowns of this year's budget on a schedule that left no room to test the case.